Cinemorphosis

Tag: weight-loss

  • Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    Ozempic and the Gospel of Suffering

    In his Washington Post essay “I’m on Ozempic. The Shaming Is Real,” Rick Reilly commits what remains, strangely enough, a minor social transgression: he admits that he loves GLP-1 drugs.

    Why wouldn’t he?

    They work.

    In three months, Reilly has lost twenty-two pounds. More importantly, he has escaped some of the relentless mental negotiations surrounding food—the calculations, cravings, promises, rationalizations, and internal committee meetings that can turn eating into a second occupation.

    You might expect people to congratulate him.

    Instead, they accuse him of cheating.

    Just exercise more, they tell him.

    Stop eating sugar.

    Use some willpower.

    In other words, please return to the traditional weight-loss program in which you spend every waking hour negotiating with a muffin.

    Reilly’s response is straightforward: Why is using effective technology considered cheating?

    Modern life is essentially one long conspiracy against doing things the hard way. We take statins to lower cholesterol. We use GPS rather than unfolding a map across the steering wheel while hurtling down the freeway. We undergo cataract surgery rather than accepting that God apparently wants the menu blurry. We use calculators, dishwashers, hearing aids, blood-pressure medication, cruise control, anesthesia, and increasingly cars capable of performing some of the driving themselves.

    Nobody emerges from surgery and announces, “Frankly, I think anesthesia was cheating.”

    Yet GLP-1 drugs somehow violate an ancient moral code.

    Even people taking them often behave like members of a secret society. At parties, Reilly says, people approach him and whisper that they’re on them too. Apparently admitting that you take a medication that helps control appetite now requires the discretion formerly reserved for revealing an affair with the tennis instructor.

    Why the embarrassment?

    Because body weight occupies a peculiar territory between medicine and morality. We don’t merely want people to lose weight. We want them to have earned the weight loss through visible suffering.

    Sweat.

    Hunger.

    Broccoli.

    Repentance.

    The acceptable thinner person must emerge from the wilderness carrying a food scale and a battered pair of running shoes.

    Tell people you lost thirty pounds by waking at five every morning, eating boiled chicken breasts, rejecting birthday cake, and performing burpees until your vision blurred, and they admire your discipline.

    Tell them a weekly injection quieted your appetite and suddenly an ethics committee needs to be convened.

    Reilly rejects the accusation that he lacks willpower. His problem, he argues, isn’t simply willpower. It’s time. Managing food can consume enormous amounts of mental bandwidth: thinking about what to eat, resisting what not to eat, calculating portions, experiencing cravings, compensating with exercise, and then beginning the entire negotiation again several hours later.

    There are only so many hours in a life.

    Why spend them arguing with a cheeseburger?

    Then comes the warning about “Ozempic Face”—the gaunt appearance associated with substantial or rapid weight loss. Reilly’s answer is that he is microdosing, trying to obtain the benefits without racing toward physical extremes. He isn’t attempting to disappear. He wants appetite control without looking as though someone left him overnight in a food dehydrator.

    So what explains the hostility?

    Some of it may indeed be envy. Watching someone obtain with medication what you obtained through years of dietary trench warfare can provoke resentment.

    But envy isn’t enough to explain it.

    Something deeper is operating: the lingering belief that appetite must be conquered through character. Discipline is virtuous precisely because discipline hurts. If technology reduces the struggle, people suspect that the resulting success is somehow counterfeit.

    This is the Moral Suspicion of Easy Weight Loss: when a difficult problem becomes easier to solve, we sometimes distrust the solution precisely because it eliminates the suffering we once considered evidence of virtue.

    There are legitimate questions about GLP-1 drugs—side effects, cost, access, long-term use, appropriate prescribing, and what happens after treatment stops. Those questions deserve serious attention.

    But “You cheated” isn’t a medical argument.

    It’s a moral complaint wearing gym clothes.

    Meanwhile, Reilly has lost the weight. The Food Noise has diminished. He has recovered mental territory previously occupied by appetite and negotiation.

    And he has no intention of surrendering it merely because someone else believes virtue should burn more calories.

  • The Discipline Ceiling

    The Discipline Ceiling

    When I followed baseball in the 1970s, certain teams seemed to have permanent reservations in the cellar. The Milwaukee Brewers. The San Diego Padres. The Washington Senators. I didn’t need to study the standings. I knew where to find them.

    At the bottom.

    Eventually, losing ceased to seem like a temporary condition and became a form of civic identity. Other teams competed for pennants. These teams competed for mathematical elimination sometime around Memorial Day. Their fans could open the sports page in August without anxiety. There would be Milwaukee, comfortably settled into the basement, unpacking boxes and hanging pictures on the walls.

    This is roughly my relationship with 230 pounds.

    For seven years, I have tried to break through that number and descend toward my promised land of 210. Occasionally I approach the border. I eat well. I exercise. I begin imagining myself entering the exotic kingdom of the 220s.

    Then 230 appears at the checkpoint.

    Not so fast.

    At this point, 230 doesn’t merely exist. It has developed a personality. It flexes its biceps. It smokes a cigar. It leans against the clubhouse wall with the serene confidence of a last-place team holding a twenty-game lead over its nearest competitor.

    Go ahead.

    Try something.

    I’ll be here.

    And it is.

    I eat mostly whole foods. In the morning, steel-cut oats. Later, a protein-heavy salad. After my nap, Greek yogurt. Dinner is protein and vegetables. I monitor portions. I exercise. I generally keep my calories below 2,500.

    Then I step on the scale.

    230.

    It’s like opening the sports page in 1974.

    Milwaukee: last place.

    Of course.

    At this point, the fitness tribunals will convene.

    “You’re eating too much.”

    Fine.

    “Reduce your calories.”

    I have.

    “Reduce them more.”

    And here we arrive at The Discipline Ceiling: the point at which a person is technically capable of imposing additional restrictions upon himself but decides that the marginal improvement isn’t worth making everyday life more miserable.

    This distinction matters because whenever weight loss stalls, the discussion inevitably becomes moral.

    You lack discipline.

    You don’t want it badly enough.

    You’re making excuses.

    Really?

    Come spend a week with me.

    Enjoy the steel-cut oats.

    Have another salad.

    Marvel as I spoon Greek yogurt into my mouth for approximately the ten-thousandth time.

    Then join me for dinner, where once again protein and vegetables await like two elderly relatives who have been sitting in the same chairs since the Eisenhower administration.

    I have discipline.

    What I don’t have is any interest in escalating it indefinitely.

    Could I eat 1,900 calories a day?

    Probably.

    Could I start intermittent fasting?

    Certainly.

    Could I go to bed hungry, wake up hungry, drink black coffee while contemplating mortality, and spend the afternoon fantasizing about a baked potato?

    Absolutely.

    I could probably reach 210 if I were willing to make weight loss the organizing principle of my existence.

    But I’m not.

    That’s my Discipline Ceiling.

    The modern optimization culture has difficulty accepting such a ceiling because its governing philosophy is that every measurable human characteristic should be improved until either perfection or death intervenes.

    Weight too high?

    Eat less.

    Still too high?

    Eat less than that.

    Hungry?

    Excellent. The program is working.

    Miserable?

    Even better. Misery demonstrates commitment.

    Soon enough you’re weighing blueberries on a digital scale and wondering whether licking the spoon requires an entry in MyFitnessPal.

    At some point, I decline.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve discovered that calories don’t matter or that my body has repealed the laws of thermodynamics. If I consistently ate substantially less, I would almost certainly lose additional weight.

    The question isn’t whether I can impose more discipline.

    The question is how much of my remaining life I’m willing to surrender to it.

    There is always another restriction available.

    Skip breakfast.

    Eliminate starch.

    Reduce dinner.

    No food after six.

    Fast sixteen hours.

    Fast eighteen.

    Count almonds.

    Fear bananas.

    Treat a tablespoon of peanut butter like an uncontrolled substance.

    Eventually you can become so disciplined that you spend your entire day thinking about the food you’re heroically not eating.

    No thanks.

    I would still like to weigh 210. I would enjoy seeing 225, then 220, then perhaps one glorious morning stepping onto the scale and seeing a number beginning with 21.

    But there are terms.

    I’ll eat nutritious food. I’ll control my portions. I’ll exercise. I’ll tolerate some hunger. I’ll maintain a degree of dietary monotony that would make a monastery cafeteria look like the Bellagio buffet.

    But I will not turn eating into punishment.

    That is the ceiling.

    Perhaps this means I’ll remain at 230.

    Perhaps 230 is my Milwaukee Brewers.

    If so, I’ll continue trying to climb out of the cellar—but I’m not going to set fire to the clubhouse to prove how badly I want the pennant.

    There is discipline.

    And then there is making your entire life kneel before a number on a bathroom scale.

    I’ve reached the ceiling.

    I’m not climbing through it.

  • The Volume Knob Principle

    The Volume Knob Principle

    When I returned from my family vacation on July 30, 2026, I stepped on the scale and saw 236 pounds.

    At sixty-four, that put me twenty-six pounds above my goal of 210 and six pounds above a barrier I hadn’t managed to penetrate since 2019.

    This called for action.

    Unfortunately, my preferred response to a problem is sometimes to attack it with a flamethrower.

    Within four days, I dropped to 230. Much of that was undoubtedly vacation water weight, but I was encouraged. The campaign had begun. I would eat properly, train hard, and finally break through the 230 barrier.

    Then I made the mistake of confusing enthusiasm with wisdom.

    I exercised every day for eleven consecutive days. Some days I did sixty-eight minutes of kettlebell circuit training followed by an hour on my Schwinn Airdyne. The kettlebells weren’t particularly heavy, but I kept moving. Then came the bike, where exercise ceased to be exercise and became a hostage negotiation with the calorie counter.

    My target was 700 calories.

    Not 620.

    Not 650.

    Seven hundred.

    I would climb onto the Airdyne and begin pedaling like a man attempting to power Southern California during a blackout. The fan roared. Sweat poured off me. My legs churned. I stared at the monitor as though the glowing digits were reporting my moral worth.

    All this punishment produced a fascinating result.

    I didn’t lose another pound.

    After eleven days of dietary virtue and exercise fanaticism, I still weighed 230.

    Then something worse happened.

    On the eleventh day, I got on the Airdyne and my body resigned.

    Normally I could grind my way toward 700 calories. This time I barely reached 300. My legs were empty. My energy vanished. It felt as though someone had opened a panel in my back and removed the battery.

    Fine, I thought. I’m exhausted. I’ll rest.

    I couldn’t.

    I crawled into bed physically demolished yet strangely agitated. Instead of relaxation came anxiety. I tossed and turned, frightened by the depth of my exhaustion. For most of my life, exercise had been one of my great sources of bliss. Now it had entered the Fear Dungeon. I had pushed myself hard enough that the thing I associated with vitality suddenly seemed capable of hurting me.

    I began wondering whether I had crossed some invisible line.

    Then I thought of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Arnold has inspired me since I was thirteen. Now in his late seventies, he reportedly still trains seven days a week for about ninety minutes: forty-five to sixty minutes of cycling followed by roughly thirty minutes of weights.

    Seven days a week.

    At nearly eighty.

    I couldn’t survive eleven.

    Was something wrong with me?

    Then, during my next kettlebell workout in the garage, I had a revelation that should have occurred to me considerably earlier.

    Arnold isn’t trying to kill Arnold.

    The older Arnold isn’t reenacting Pumping Iron every morning. He’s not storming into the gym with Wagner blasting while attempting to punish every muscle fiber for the crime of aging. His workouts appear considerably more civilized. He rides his bike. He lifts. He talks to people. He jokes. A man of immense charisma, he holds court. For Arnold, the gym is partly exercise and partly social club.

    Meanwhile, I’m alone in my garage behaving as though the Schwinn Airdyne knows where the bodies are buried.

    The difference isn’t necessarily discipline.

    It’s volume.

    I began imagining my exercise program controlled by a giant amplifier knob.

    Mine was turned to Eleven.

    Nigel Tufnel would have approved.

    Every workout had to be harder. Every bike session had to produce the magic number. Every day off looked suspiciously like weakness. If 600 calories was good, 700 was better. If four workouts were productive, eleven consecutive workouts must transform me into a Greek god sometime before Labor Day.

    Except my body wasn’t becoming a Greek god.

    It was filing a grievance.

    That’s when I arrived at The Volume Knob Principle: sustainable fitness isn’t about turning effort as high as it will go. It’s about finding the highest setting from which your body can reliably recover.

    For me, Eleven was not heroic.

    Eleven was stupid.

    So I’m turning the knob down to Seven.

    I’ll continue my kettlebell circuits because I enjoy them. But I’ll allow myself a minute of rest when I need it. I’ll trim the workouts from sixty-eight minutes to about sixty-three and limit them to three days a week.

    The Airdyne requires a more dramatic intervention.

    Getting 700 calories in under an hour was beating me up. Doing it three or four times a week was beating me up with a folding chair after I was already on the ground.

    So the bike goes down to twice a week.

    And 700 loses its throne.

    The new target is 600.

    This sounds easy until you understand the psychology of the calorie counter. Once you’ve repeatedly produced 700, anything less starts feeling like moral decline. The machine reports 600 and some primitive voice says, Pathetic. You used to be somebody.

    That voice needs to shut up.

    Six hundred isn’t a failed 700.

    Seven isn’t a failed Eleven.

    A rest day isn’t evidence of decadence.

    At sixty-four, perhaps the great fitness challenge isn’t learning how hard you can push yourself. I mastered that trick decades ago. The harder lesson is learning when pushing harder becomes indistinguishable from stupidity.

    I can’t train exactly like Arnold.

    I don’t need to.

    I can steal the more useful lesson from the older Arnold: keep moving, keep lifting, keep showing up—but stop treating every workout like the beaches of Normandy.

    Turn down the Volume Knob.

    Eleven makes more noise.

    Seven lets you keep playing.

  • Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    Waiting for the Norwegian Sweat Lodge

    I often think about something Samuel Wilson Fussell wrote in his memoir Muscle. At the height of his bodybuilding obsession, he resented the hours between one workout and the next. Training made life bearable. Everything else was simply waiting.

    I understand that feeling better than I wish I did.

    Every workout is Christmas morning.

    The days between workouts are spent writing exercise programs the way children write Christmas lists. Should I begin with kettlebell swings? Goblet squats? Romanian deadlifts? Reverse lunges? The anticipation becomes its own form of pleasure. I don’t merely look forward to training. I ache for it.

    I’m almost sixty-five, and my one-hour kettlebell sessions in the garage have become my transcendental escape. They feel less like exercise than boarding a flight to a Norwegian sweat lodge hidden deep within a pine forest. There, steam rises through the trees like incense. The air is clean. My mind finally grows quiet. For an hour, I take a vacation from my own neuroses.

    Age, however, imposes its own theology.

    Injury is now the unforgivable sin.

    At twenty-five, I could bully my body into submission. At sixty-five, my body is the senior partner in the relationship. It insists on negotiation. I have to lift lighter, move smarter, recover longer, yet still wander close enough to my physical limits that my muscles receive the message without my tendons filing a formal complaint. Fifty years under the barbell have taught me where that narrow path lies. The art is approaching the cliff without tumbling over it.

    I cannot exaggerate how much I treasure those three weekly workouts.

    Three.

    No more.

    My body has cast its vote.

    The remaining days belong to the Schwinn Airdyne.

    Calling it “cardio” feels charitable. The Airdyne is less Norwegian sweat lodge than medieval torture device, a machine apparently designed by monks who believed salvation was achieved only through prolonged respiratory distress. If I could replace every Airdyne session with kettlebells, I would do it tomorrow. Unfortunately, my joints have become more persuasive than my enthusiasm.

    Training, however, is only half the bargain.

    Then comes eating.

    Or, more precisely, eating the right amount.

    People often say, “Just eat healthy.”

    That’s charming.

    I can eat salmon, berries, oatmeal, Greek yogurt, beans, and vegetables until I resemble a prosperous bear preparing for hibernation. My problem has never been distinguishing broccoli from doughnuts. My problem is that my default setting is abundance.

    Real nutrition isn’t merely choosing healthy foods.

    It’s choosing enough healthy foods—and then stopping.

    That is where the real battle begins.

    Like most people, I live with a steady stream of food noise humming in the background of my consciousness. Portion control doesn’t silence that noise. It merely lowers the volume enough that I can hear myself think.

    Yesterday was a perfect example.

    Breakfast was oatmeal, protein powder, soy milk, and berries. Lunch was a shrimp-and-tuna salad. After my afternoon nap came plain Greek yogurt with mango. Dinner was salmon over a salad with white rice and garbanzo beans, followed by an apple.

    Roughly 2,400 calories.

    Objectively, I ate well.

    Subjectively, I was hungry for most of the day.

    Not Hungry with a capital H.

    Not the desperate hunger of starvation.

    Just small-h hunger.

    And over the years I have learned something the fitness influencers rarely advertise between shirtless selfies and discount codes:

    Successful weight management is usually hungrier than unsuccessful weight management.

    If you’re never a little hungry, there’s a good chance you’re eating enough to maintain exactly the body you already have.

    That isn’t a tragedy.

    It’s simply arithmetic.

    If I want the leaner, stronger body my kettlebell training is trying to build, then I must accept small-h hunger as the price of admission.

    So I make peace with it.

    Because somewhere in the distance, beyond another measured meal and another day of anticipation, I can already see that Norwegian sweat lodge rising from the forest. Steam drifts through the evergreens like a veil. The kettlebells are waiting.

    And, like Christmas morning, it will be worth every hour I spent waiting.

  • Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    Resurrection Fatigue and the Will to Begin Again

    My first memory of stepping onto a scale came in September of 1973. I was eleven years old, living in Nairobi, Kenya, recovering from the flu. I had barely eaten in several days and wondered whether I still weighed one hundred pounds. Curious, I wandered into my parents’ bathroom, climbed onto the scale, and watched the needle settle at ninety-seven.

    It seemed like a trivial moment.

    It wasn’t.

    Six months later my family returned to California, and I joined the Junior Olympic Weightlifting team at Earl Warren Junior High. From then on, weigh-ins became as routine as brushing my teeth. The scale was no longer a bathroom fixture. It became a judge.

    Within a year I was competing in the 148-pound class and, for a brief, glorious moment, ranked number one in the nation. Then I watched Pumping Iron.

    Like countless teenage boys before and after me, I fell under Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spell. His charisma was so overwhelming that Olympic weightlifting suddenly seemed like yesterday’s religion. I converted to bodybuilding.

    From that point forward, every weigh-in became an attempt to measure myself against Arnold. He stood six-foot-two and weighed about 230 pounds. I was five-foot-eleven, so simple arithmetic convinced me that 220 pounds would make me his earthly cousin.

    By sixteen I weighed 195 pounds, naturally lean and deeply tanned. A classmate named Kay McQuade told me I looked perfect.

    Poor Kay.

    She didn’t realize she was competing with Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Compliments bounced harmlessly off my ego because perfection had already been assigned another number.

    By eighteen I weighed 210 pounds and could bench press four hundred pounds. I assumed 220 was inevitable.

    It wasn’t.

    At nineteen I competed in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco contest and finished runner-up. Contest dieting stripped away fat—and a good deal of muscle—until I weighed a shredded 180 pounds. I had never taken steroids. I wasn’t enormous, but I looked the way I had imagined a bodybuilder should look.

    Soon afterward I retired from competition.

    I continued lifting because it steadied my mind as much as it strengthened my body, and I settled comfortably around 205 pounds.

    That became my dating weight.

    Then, at thirty-two, something quietly went wrong.

    My weight climbed to 235 pounds with astonishing speed. The muscles remained underneath, but they now seemed trapped beneath an expanding layer of softness. I no longer looked powerful. I looked inflated.

    I became obsessed.

    Calories.

    Body fat.

    Scales.

    Mirrors.

    Thinking about my weight occupied so much mental real estate that you would have assumed all that rumination would produce results.

    It didn’t.

    When I began dating the woman who would become my wife, romance arrived carrying a dessert menu. We celebrated by eating at restaurants, lingering over dinners, and ordering sweets with cheerful abandon. Love and indulgence turned out to be enthusiastic dinner companions.

    By 2003, one year into our marriage, I weighed 257 pounds.

    There is photographic evidence.

    Somewhere on my wife’s Mac sits an image of me sprawled across our living-room couch with a bowl of popcorn studded with chocolate kisses. Melted chocolate decorates my face like war paint from a battle I had decisively lost.

    My daughters love that photograph.

    They laugh every time they find it.

    I don’t.

    When I look at that man, I don’t merely see obesity. I see someone whose appetites have staged a successful coup. He looks less like a husband than a failed republic.

    The next two decades became an exhausting cycle of resurrection and relapse.

    In 2004 I embraced a reduced-carbohydrate diet and returned to a respectable 205 pounds.

    Mission accomplished.

    Then came complacency.

    Back to 235.

    Years later I repeated the feat.

    Back to 205.

    Back to 235.

    In 2017 I met a remarkably fit celebrity chef whose daughters attended school with mine. His example inspired me to cut calories again. By August of 2018 I weighed a lean 200 pounds.

    Victory.

    Temporary victory.

    The weight quietly returned, as faithful to me as an old friend who never forgets my address.

    The last photograph of myself that I genuinely admire was taken in Yosemite in 2019.

    My daughters and I are standing beneath El Capitan. I’m wearing a black T-shirt and a Seiko Monster with its coral-blue dial mounted on a hulking Super Engineer bracelet. My arms are muscular. My face is lean. My expression carries a quiet confidence that only hindsight fully appreciates.

    Now I look at that photograph the way one studies an old passport.

    Proof that I once lived there.

    Then came COVID.

    For eighteen months I shuffled around the house in pajamas, taught college classes online, and discovered that home workouts were no match for comfort eating. My weight drifted back toward 240.

    As I write this in August 2026, I weigh 230 pounds.

    It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t seen the 220s since 2019.

    Seven years.

    Seven years hovering above 230, occasionally visiting 240 whenever vacation invited me to overstay my welcome at the buffet.

    Last week my family returned from Carlsbad.

    I came home weighing 236.

    Three disciplined days later I was back to 230.

    I now eat roughly 2,400 calories and about 140 grams of protein each day. Three times a week I spend sixty-five minutes in my garage swinging kettlebells. Twice a week I climb aboard my Schwinn Airdyne and pedal as if someone were chasing me with bad bloodwork.

    I have little doubt that I will soon break below 230.

    The problem is that I have already celebrated this victory several times before.

    I suffer from what I call Resurrection Fatigue: the exhaustion that arises from repeatedly rebuilding oneself after failure while knowing that every previous resurrection eventually gave way to another collapse. Each new beginning carries not only hope but memory.

    Memory can be a cruel training partner.

    It whispers:

    “You’ve been here before.”

    On difficult days I hear another voice.

    “What’s the point? You’ll gain it back anyway. You’re almost sixty-five. Eat the pizza. Order the carrot cake. You’ve had a good run.”

    Ironically, many of my eighteen-year-old students agree with that sentiment.

    Recently I asked them whether they would rather live to sixty-five eating whatever they pleased or live to one hundred on an austere diet.

    Every single one chose sixty-five.

    I understood their answer.

    At eighteen, death is an abstraction.

    At sixty-five, it has a calendar.

    You no longer think in terms of someday.

    You think in terms of seasons remaining.

    You become strangely willing to fight for another episode.

    No one wants his television series cancelled.

    So I’m still fighting.

    I know every trap.

    I know every rationalization.

    I know exactly how easily discipline dissolves into complacency.

    But I also know what waits on the other side of twenty lost pounds.

    Less sleep apnea.

    Healthier cholesterol.

    Less pain in my ankles.

    More years with my wife.

    More years watching my daughters become the women they are meant to be.

    Getting down to 210 is no longer about vanity.

    It is about longevity.

    It is about mental health.

    It is about refusing to surrender while the fight is still mine to wage.

    The older I become, the less interested I am in looking like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    I would settle for looking like a man who refused to quit.

  • The First Rule of Diet Club

    The First Rule of Diet Club

    The first rule of dieting is beautifully simple: don’t talk about dieting. The moment you begin enthusiastically recounting your Fourth of July bacchanal—how you mainlined salami, slabs of Muenster cheese, triple-fudge brownies, and vanilla bean ice cream until you were convinced you had one foot in the grave and the other in a podiatrist’s office diagnosing gout—you have already begun sabotaging yourself. Soon your audience will be treated to your target weight, your macros, your supplement stack, your Mediterranean meal plan, and your newly acquired expertise in insulin sensitivity, fibermaxxing, and protein optimization. You will sound like someone who completed an online doctorate in nutrition sometime between dessert and midnight. Unfortunately, the odds that you will still be following the plan by next weekend hover somewhere around the lifespan of a mayfly.

    The irony is that talking about dieting feels suspiciously like dieting. You receive the emotional reward before earning the physical result. Friends nod approvingly while you bask in the warm glow of your imminent transformation. The fantasy becomes so satisfying that the actual work begins to feel almost optional. Meanwhile, everyone else quietly wonders why they have become unwilling participants in your nutritional TED Talk. Like nearly every worthwhile endeavor, dieting rewards execution rather than narration. Calories are indifferent to speeches. Fat cells are unimpressed by declarations of intent. Biology has never once accepted enthusiasm as a substitute for consistency.

    Then comes the humbling realization that your revolutionary plan is neither revolutionary nor particularly new. You have saddled this horse before—roughly a hundred and twenty times. Your success rate for reaching your target weight, less than 5%, is discouraging enough; your success rate for keeping it there is indistinguishable from zero. 

    With this in mind, you briefly entertain the modern miracle of GLP-1 medications, only to discover that the price, potential side effects, and your physician’s reluctance to prescribe them leave you unconvinced. So, in the colorful language of the internet, you decide to raw-dog the process. 

    Beneath all these failed diets lies a more subtle addiction. You are not merely addicted to food. You are addicted to self-reinvention. Every new eating plan promises not simply a smaller waistline but a new identity—a wiser, leaner, more disciplined version of yourself who will finally silence the persistent suspicion that you have somehow fallen short of your own expectations. The tragedy is that this future self often functions less as a destination than as a mirage shimmering just beyond the horizon.

    And yet, abandoning the effort altogether is hardly an attractive alternative. Better to struggle toward health than surrender to gluttony with theatrical resignation. So make your plan. Count your calories. Work out with the kettlebells. Ride the bike. Eat the vegetables. Decline the brownies. But keep your mouth shut. Announce nothing. Promise nothing. Let your bathroom scale and your belt become your only press secretaries. The instant you begin proclaiming your impending metamorphosis, your words become dietary Kryptonite, knocking Superman out of the sky and sending him headfirst into a vat of vanilla bean ice cream. Silence, it turns out, may be the most underrated weight-loss supplement of all.

  • My Diet Revolution Will Not be Livestreamed

    My Diet Revolution Will Not be Livestreamed

    Today marks my first day of abandoning snacks and eating only three meals.

    I’m already making minor adjustments. I think I’ll add a couple of eggs to lunch to help carry me through the long stretch between 11:30 and 5:00. After dinner, I’ll finish with a small crystal bowl of Greek yogurt, berries, and a drizzle of honey—not as a fourth meal, but as a civilized period at the end of the sentence. It softens the psychological blow of eliminating my beloved post-nap yogurt-and-protein-powder ritual without turning dessert into another calorie ambush.

    As I write this, about four and a half hours after lunch, I won’t pretend it’s effortless.

    I notice the absence of the snack.

    My stomach notices it.

    My brain notices it even more.

    It keeps floating little suggestions.

    “You know, one handful of almonds wouldn’t count.”

    “A spoonful of peanut butter is practically medicine.”

    “Surely Greek yogurt exists outside the jurisdiction of snacks.”

    My appetite has hired an exceptionally creative attorney.

    But the discomfort is remarkably ordinary.

    I’m not suffering.

    I’m not wandering the Sahara with cracked lips and hallucinations.

    I’m simply a little hungry.

    If tolerating that mild inconvenience helps me lose twenty pounds, it strikes me as an excellent bargain.

    The larger lesson has nothing to do with nutrition.

    It’s about refusing to become a baby.

    Modern life encourages us to interpret every minor discomfort as an emergency requiring immediate relief. Hungry? Eat. Bored? Snack. Tired? Caffeinate. Restless? Scroll. We have become connoisseurs of eliminating even the slightest irritation before it has a chance to teach us anything.

    Perhaps that’s why ordinary self-discipline now gets marketed as though it were a heroic expedition.

    Someone skips dessert for three days and suddenly there’s a podcast, a YouTube channel, and a line of merchandise celebrating their “journey.”

    I have no interest in becoming that guy.

    You will not see me posting a dramatic video titled How I Defeated Hunger and Reclaimed My Life.

    There will be no livestream documenting my courageous decision to survive the dangerous interval between lunch and dinner.

    No inspirational soundtrack.

    No slow-motion footage.

    No sermon about embracing pain.

    Because there is no pain.

    There is only structure.

    There is only routine.

    There is only a modest reduction in calories.

    Sometimes common sense is refreshingly unglamorous. It doesn’t require a manifesto, a support group, or a motivational speech. It merely asks us to tolerate a small amount of discomfort in exchange for a much larger reward.

    That hardly qualifies as heroism.

    It’s just growing up.

  • Chasing Nirvana on the Misery Machine

    Chasing Nirvana on the Misery Machine

    For the past three years, I have climbed aboard the Schwinn Airdyne AD7—better known in my household as the Misery Machine—two or three times a week for fifty to sixty minutes. It complements my three weekly kettlebell workouts by providing just enough suffering to convince me that my life choices deserve constant reevaluation. On a typical ride I burn between 600 and 750 calories. About once a month I have a monster workout that sails past 800 calories. About once a month I have the opposite experience, when my body feels as though it has been poured full of wet concrete and refuses every command I issue. On those days I wave the white flag around the 500-calorie mark.

    The workouts embody the old saying, “It hurts so good,” though that cliché hardly captures what actually happens. On my best days, the ride unfolds in two distinct psychological stages that I have come to call Nirvana I and Nirvana II.

    Nirvana I usually arrives around the 400-calorie mark, roughly thirty to thirty-three minutes into the workout. By then my shirt has surrendered completely to perspiration. Sweat drips from my elbows, pools beneath the bike, and convinces any reasonable observer that the plumbing has failed. My breathing settles into a steady rhythm, the static disappears from my mind, and I feel as though I have been lowered into a warm bath of endorphins. The outside world recedes. My obligations disappear. There is only the machine and me. About eighty percent of my workouts reach this stage.

    Nirvana II is another matter entirely.

    It cannot be scheduled, negotiated, or bullied into existence. It appears only on those rare mornings when physiology, mood, sleep, and providence decide to cooperate. I continue sweating rivers, but fatigue never quite catches me. My cadence remains smooth. My breathing stays controlled. Instead of counting down the remaining minutes, I begin believing absurd things.

    “I’m unstoppable.”

    The Misery Machine no longer owns me.

    I own it.

    The fan roars. My legs keep driving. Every revolution of the pedals reinforces the illusion that I have temporarily escaped the ordinary laws of aging and entropy. For twenty glorious minutes I become convinced I could ride forever. Nirvana II is the Holy Grail of my fitness life. It is the workout equivalent of pitching a perfect game.

    Unfortunately, every heaven has its corresponding hell.

    I call it Shut Down.

    Unlike Nirvana, Shut Down announces itself almost immediately. Within the first fifteen minutes I can tell something is wrong. My breathing becomes shallow. My legs feel leaden. The usual RPMs suddenly resemble Olympic qualifying standards. Every minute feels borrowed.

    Years of yoga have taught me not to argue with these days.

    When Shut Down arrives, resistance is futile. I simply acknowledge reality.

    “Today is not my day.”

    I lower the intensity, keep pedaling, and allow my body to dictate the terms of surrender. Most Shut Down workouts end around forty minutes and 450 calories. They leave me discouraged, though experience has taught me not to overreact. Ninety-nine percent of the time the next workout restores me to normal, as though my body merely needed to remind me who actually runs the operation.

    Oddly enough, the existence of Nirvana II is what keeps drawing me back.

    Every workout carries the possibility of discovering that elusive state again. It is exercise’s version of Christmas morning. Will today be the day? Will I feel invincible? Will I conquer the Misery Machine instead of merely surviving it?

    I never know.

    That uncertainty is precisely what makes me keep climbing back aboard.

  • Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    Restraint Is the Superpower You Need

    In a few months I will turn sixty-five, and at first glance I appear to be doing everything right. I swing kettlebells. I pedal my Schwinn Airdyne with the determination of a man trying to escape a prison camp. I accumulate sweat at an industrial scale. My workouts are filled with muscle, stamina, grit, and a willingness to suffer that borders on the theatrical.

    Yet I deserve no bragging rights.

    In fact, I deserve a large serving of Humble Pie with a side dish of Contrition.

    Why?

    Because after decades of lifting, pedaling, sweating, straining, and pretending to be a rugged disciple of physical culture, I somehow missed the memo about the true superpower of fitness.

    The superpower is restraint.

    Not deadlifts. Not kettlebells. Not interval training. Not grit.

    Restraint.

    The real challenge arrives not during a workout but fifteen minutes before one, when a tiny twinge of hunger appears and whispers seductive nonsense into your ear.

    “Perhaps a small snack?”

    The suggestion seems harmless enough. Maybe some apple slices. A few crackers. A little hummus. Nothing excessive. Nothing worthy of a confession.

    But this is where adulthood enters the arena.

    The inner child says, “I’m hungry.”

    The inner adult replies, “You’ll survive.”

    The child says, “Let’s eat something.”

    The adult says, “No. This feeling is temporary.”

    The child says, “But I’m uncomfortable.”

    The adult says, “A little discomfort is not an emergency.”

    The child says, “What if I starve?”

    The adult says, “You weigh 230 pounds. Starvation is not currently on the agenda.”

    The child says, “I need fuel.”

    The adult says, “You need self-control.”

    The child says, “You’re mean.”

    The adult says, “Finish your workout.”

    This conversation, repeated thousands of times over a lifetime, turns out to matter far more than any exercise program.

    Unfortunately, while I spent decades cultivating muscle and stamina, I neglected to cultivate authority over my rapacious inner child. The result is that I carry roughly thirty extra pounds around like a monument to unfinished business.

    My doctor wants me to get my annual blood work done—cholesterol, triglycerides, glucose, and the rest of the alphabet soup. But I find myself reluctant.

    Why?

    Because the last time I took the test I weighed 230 pounds.

    A year later, I still weigh 230 pounds.

    Why spend money confirming what I already know?

    Part of me wants to send my doctor a message:

    “Dear Doctor,

    I am currently too fat to appreciate another blood test. The numbers will simply inform us that I remain exactly as fat as I was last year. Instead, I am attempting to acquire the superpower of restraint. Once I possess it, I shall happily report for blood work so that both of us may enjoy the pleasant novelty of improved results.”

    The power of restraint is difficult to overstate.

    Right now I train six days a week and hover around 230 pounds. I suspect I consume something close to 3,000 calories a day.

    If I consistently reduced that intake to around 2,200 calories, I could probably eliminate half my training volume. I could abandon hours of cardio, keep a few weekly kettlebell sessions, and gradually become a lean, muscular 200-pound version of myself.

    That realization is both liberating and humiliating.

    For years I treated exercise as the hero of the story.

    Exercise is important, but restraint is the executive producer.

    Exercise burns calories.

    Restraint prevents them from arriving in the first place.

    Exercise can strengthen your body.

    Restraint changes your body.

    Exercise can improve your health.

    Restraint determines whether the improvements are visible.

    Training can carry you only so far. At some point you arrive at a fork in the road where sweat stops being the limiting factor and appetite takes over.

    That is where the battle is won or lost.

    Restraint is the exit sign leading away from adiposity and self-reproach.

    Restraint is the quiet force that makes training matter.

    Restraint is what allows effort to cash its check.

    And so, as I prepare for today’s workout, there will be no pre-exercise snack. No crackers. No apple slices. No hummus.

    Just a tall glass of Contrition.

    And perhaps, if I am fortunate, a small sip of adulthood.

  • Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    Leanmaxxing and the New Fantasy of Frictionless Medicine

    As a boy watching Star Trek, I was transfixed by the Tricorder–that tidy slab of certainty doctors waved over a body the way a priest might wave incense over a mystery. No scalpels, no tubes, no anxious waiting rooms with their stale magazines and fluorescent despair. A quick scan, a soft chirp, and the problem surrendered. The body, usually so coy and uncooperative, became a readable document–its secrets itemized, its fate clarified. It was medicine without friction, diagnosis without drama. In that universe, ignorance lasted seconds.

    For decades, the Tricorder sat where all good fantasies sit: just out of reach, gleaming with impossible efficiency. But reality has a way of cheating. The future did not arrive as a handheld scanner; it arrived as chemistry–specifically, a class of drugs that seems to negotiate directly with the body’s most stubborn impulses. If the Tricorder promised instant knowledge, GLP-1 drugs promise something more unnerving: the quiet rewriting of appetite, metabolism, and behavior from the inside out.

    In her New York Times essay “The Great Ozempic Experiment,” Julia Belluz catalogs the early returns, and they read less like a drug profile than a wish list that forgot to edit itself. Yes, there’s weight loss–the headline act–but the understudies keep stealing the show: concussion recovery, addiction dampening, relief from menopause symptoms, long COVID, alopecia, inflammation, arthritis, IBS, anxiety, brain fog. The list grows with the confidence of a rumor that keeps being confirmed. By the time you finish reading, you suspect the drug might also fix your credit score.

    The catch, for now, is almost comically modest: nausea and paperwork. The body may revolt briefly; the insurance company may revolt permanently. Yet demand surges, fueled by users who report not just slimmer bodies but upgraded lives–better mood, sharper focus, revived social calendars, improved fertility. It’s less a medication than a lifestyle intervention with a prescription pad.

    Clinicians, watching this unfold, have begun to reach for a new framework–the “root-cause” theory–because the old boxes no longer hold. These drugs don’t respect the tidy borders between endocrine, cardiovascular, and neurological disease; they trespass, improve, and move on. Even more disorienting, benefits appear in patients who don’t lose weight at all: better heart, liver, and kidney function, as if the drug were quietly tuning systems we didn’t know were connected.

    And here is where the story turns from miracle to question mark. As GLP-1 use spreads–along with the culture’s sudden enthusiasm for “leanmaxxing”–we risk trading one distortion for another: the cartoon body, now achieved pharmacologically rather than cosmetically. It is far too early to crown these drugs the real-world Tricorder, and just as premature to condemn them as a Faustian bargain. Like AI, they are moving faster than our ability to narrate them. We are watching a technology outrun our categories, and the only honest response, for now, is attention without prophecy.